The Atomic Explosion

Best in Show: 'The Atomic Explosion' at Peter Blum

The Village Voice

Over 30 years after the last aboveground test of an atomic bomb, the
mushroom cloud—that ultimate symbol of apocalypse—doesn't look so
fearsome in this fascinating collection of photographs, all taken in the
two decades following World War II to document nuclear explosions.
Isolated on the gallery's walls, removed from their original context,
these images (mostly black and white) often carry a disquieting
spiritual beauty. The irony hangs in the air like fallout, but those
giant plumes, gracefully rising far above the earth's surface, suggest
ascensions to heaven. A glowing orange fireball and its white halo of
vapor—captured during a 1954 test on Bikini Atoll—appears as nothing less than a vision of God. Elsewhere, from 1951, guinea-pig soldiers of the 11th Airborne Division kneel like acolytes before a towering column of dust and debris, which looms astonishingly close to their position.

The immense physical presence of the blasts can be weirdly sculptural. In a 1946 South Pacific
test, the monstrous mushroom has such startling symmetry and solidity
that it seems to be some permanent structure assembled out of concrete.
Nearby, a taller, treelike shape may be less visually impressive, but
the caption makes the shot the exhibit's most conceptually
haunting—beneath the billowing smoke sits Nagasaki, at the moment when 40,000 residents were vaporized.